• The startup CTGT has raised over $7 million in a seed funding round led by Gradient Ventures.
• The company addresses the growing demand for domain-specific, customized machine learning models.
• Other investors include General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Paul Graham.

CTGT, a startup focused on helping enterprise clients train and deploy machine learning models at lower cost, has raised $7.2 million in a funding round led by Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-geared venture arm.

The deal shows investors are still optimistic about startups developing tools to train models, as companies like Google, OpenAI, and Elon Musk's xAI jostle to produce a foundation model more capable than all others.

Cyril Gorlla, cofounder and CEO of CTGT, says many businesses have access to these generalized models but can't deploy them because of the inherent risks. It may hallucinate a response or display bias. For example, a healthcare provider can't risk a medical chatbot giving dangerous advice. A tech company wouldn't want a digital agent referring customers to its competition.

CTGT's solution allows enterprise clients to take one of these off-the-shelf foundation models and imbue it with their brand voice and data. It claims to lower the massive amounts of computing resources needed through a process called feature learning, where a system learns to recognize patterns and structures in raw data without being explicitly programmed.

Gorlla says the platform actively monitors and audits a client's custom models, allowing it to better spot and eliminate unwanted behavior. Enterprises can also refine and retrain models on the fly without the need to take models offline for updates.

Vig Sachidananda, a partner at Gradient, says the startup addresses a need for more reliable and bespoke alternatives to generalized models.

"We're seeing AI models rapidly progress in capabilities," Sachidananda said. "As models take on more tasks and those with increasing complexity there is a growing need from enterprises for systems that can help improve safety, provide more accurate responses, and mitigate biases."

"We're excited about CTGT as they're developing a novel approach to tackle these problems by helping enterprises interpret and control how models internally understand concepts, such as those that can relate to unsafe or unexpected behavior," he added.

Other investors in the company's seed funding round include General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, and angel investors like Paul Graham, Zapier cofounder Mike Knoop, François Chollet, creator of the Keras deep-learning library, and one of Facebook's first employees, Taner Halıcıoğlu.

Gorlla, 23, started the company last year with a former classmate, Trevor Tuttle, at the University of California San Diego. The two dropped out and were admitted to Y Combinator, the storied startup accelerator behind Airbnb, DoorDash, and Twitch.

CTGT, which gets its name from Gorlla and Tuttle's scrambled initials, says it's already testing its tech with three unnamed Fortune 10 companies. One of its first customers, the professional accounting firm Ebrada Financial Group, uses the platform to improve the reliability of its frontline customer service chatbots.

• Artificial intelligence has led to a boom in new startup creation and dealmaking.
• Business Insider researched startups that have strong founding teams and investor dollars.
• These are our top picks, listed alphabetically, of startups you could bet your career on in 2025.

After years of contraction, cost-cutting, and layoffs, there's been a resurgence of tech dealmaking in Silicon Valley thanks to the AI boom. Business Insider rounded up a number of technology and AI startups that are growing. Here are our top picks.

Abridge

HQ: Pittsburgh

Total raised: $462.5 million

What it does: The medical scribe startup translates patient-doctor interactions into clinical notes in electronic medical records.

What makes it promising: Abridge's business exploded in 2024 as investors rushed to fund companies automating administrative tasks in healthcare. The startup, which is backed by top VC firms, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, just raised $250 million in new funding at a million valuation. Its deals with top health systems, such as Kaiser Permanente, and its partnership with medical records giant Epic have made Abridge the healthcare AI startup to beat.

Anysphere

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $176 million

What it does: Anysphere makes AI coding software

What makes it promising: You may not have heard of Anysphere but you are likely familiar with its popular AI coding assistant, Cursor, that can predict a user's next line of code. The company recently raised $105 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. Notable investors include Benchmark, Andreessen Horowitz, and OpenAI.

Attention

HQ: New York

Total raised: $17.1 million

What it does: Attention uses natural language processing to fill out CRM programs and generate action items from sales calls.

What makes it promising: Some companies spend millions of dollars on customer relationship management programs, which are essentially software for sales teams that house crucial information about current and potential customers. The problem? Many teams don't properly fill out their CRM, rendering the investment useless. That's where Attention comes in — the startup uses AI to listen in on sales calls, fill out company CRMs with crucial information, and generate action items so a sales team member has the info they need to go back and close a deal.

Attention raised $14 million from Alven, Eniac, Frst, Liquid 2 Ventures, 645 Ventures, and Aglaé in October 2024.

Clasp

HQ: Boston

Total raised: $30 million, according to the company

What it does: Clasp helps employers secure critical talent before graduation, tackling workforce shortages in hard-to-hire fields like healthcare. Think of it like ROTC for critical professions. If a hospital system is facing a shrinking pipeline of nurses, it can partner with Clasp to access a national network of universities and training programs, match with current nursing students, and commit to repaying their student loans over a multi-year word period.

What makes it promising: Founded in 2018, Clasp has over 10,000 individuals on its platform and plenty of room to grow. While it's currently focused on building critical talent pools for the healthcare industry, the company plans to expand into other hard-to-hire industries. In 2024, Clasp raised over $10 million in a funding round led by Crosslink Capital and is actively investing in its growth team to scale employer and school partnerships.

CodaMetrix

HQ: Boston

Total raised: $95 million

What it does: CodaMetrix uses AI to analyze clinical notes and derive medical codes for billing and claims.

What makes it promising: Coding is a critical step of the revenue cycle management process for hospitals, typically requiring providers to manually assign numerical codes to medical services and diagnoses to ensure they get paid for their care.

CodaMetrix spun out of Mass General Brigham in 2019 to automate those administrative tasks and reduce provider burden, and it's captured a wave of investor interest in the sector, last raising a $40 million Series B round in March. The startup has worked with top health systems like Mayo Clinic and Yale Medicine to develop new revenue cycle management solutions, and it added some key hires to its executive team last year, including a new chief technology officer and COO.

Cohere Health

HQ: Boston

Total raised: $106 million

What it does: Cohere Health automates the pre-authorization process for medical treatments.

What makes it promising: Cohere Health works with health plans like Humana and Geisinger to make the prior authorization process more efficient and accurate, using AI to save money for the plans and reduce the number of unnecessary denials for patients. The startup last raised a $50 million Series B extension in February 2024, led by Deerfield Management and including existing investors, including Define Ventures and Flare Capital Partners.

Cohere has announced a number of new products in the last year, including tools released in January to help health plans meet prior authorization compliance standards set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Coram AI

HQ: Sunnyvale, California

Total raised: $30 million

What it does: Coram AI puts agentic AI software into existing security systems and cameras.

What makes it promising: The US is filled with businesses and buildings that have non-operational security systems, Coram says. The startup's solution is an AI software that ports onto existing security hardware systems to provide generative AI visual security via AI agents that can identify and track threats in real time.

Coram raised $13.8 million in January from Battery Ventures, 8VC, and Mosaic Ventures.

Cortica

HQ: San Diego

Total raised: Over $300 million

What it does: Cortica provides virtual and in-person pediatric care for autism, as well as commonly co-occurring conditions like behavioral issues and sleep disorders.

What makes it promising: Cortica has set itself apart by going after value-based care contracts with health plans and employers that pay the startup for better patient outcomes, a rarity in specialized mental healthcare. The startup employs more than 2,000 providers that help care for children with autism at its clinics, in the home, or virtually, aiming to deliver "whole-child care" through everything from physical therapy to speech-language pathology to neurology. Cortica most recently raised an $80 million round in November, co-led by JP Morgan's healthcare investment fund Morgan Health and Nexus NeuroTech Ventures.

Daedalus

HQ: Karlsruhe, Germany

Total raised: $32.6 million

What it does: Daedalus helps factories and their production robots operate more efficiently.

What makes it promising: Launched by ex-OpenAI engineer Jonas Schneider, who was a key part of the AI juggernaut's robotics team, Daedalus was part of Y Combinator's winter 2020 cohort. The startup, which also has an office in San Francisco, uses AI robotics technology to cull the need to reprogram production robots constantly. Instead, it automates a lot of the tasks associated with the manufacturing process; for example, if clients give Daedalus a CAD drawing, it will render a fully-completed version of the drawing.

In February 2024, the startup raised a fresh $21 million Series A. The funding will help Daedalus in its mission of automating the manufacturing process across various industries, from semiconductors to healthcare.

Decagon

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $100 million

What it does: Decagon develops AI support agents that autonomously resolve customer inquiries over chat, email, or voice calls.

What makes it promising: The company raised $100 million, including a $65 million Series B, late last year. Bain Capital Ventures led the Series B round, and Elad Gil, A*, Accel, Bond Capital, and Acme Capital participated. According to the company's blog, the fundraise quadrupled Decagon's valuation. Bilt, Duolingo, Eventbrite, Notion, and Rippling use Decagon to manage interactions with customers by gathering data and reviewing conversations.

Decart

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $53 million, according to the company

What it does: Decart is an AI research lab focused on efficiency. Its infrastructure platform aims to dramatically cut the costs of training and running foundation models.

Why it's promising: Last fall, Decart emerged from stealth with $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia and Oren Zeev and launched a demo, Oasis, that captivated the tech world. Oasis's video platform enables users to create interactive, open-world experiences from a single uploaded image and generates content in real time based on user input. In December, the Israeli-founded startup secured an additional $32 million from Benchmark and other investors. Since then, Decart has doubled its team size and continues developing new products.

Elise AI

HQ: New York

Total raised: $172 million

What it does: EliseAI sells AI assistants, primarily to housing operators, as well as healthcare providers. These speed up menial tasks such as maintenance requests and scheduling appointments.

What makes it promising: The startup hit a unicorn valuation in 2024 with a $75 million Series D. Its technology is revolutionary for the housing sector, which previously suffered from inefficient technology, resulting in consumers absorbing additional costs, said founder and CEO Minna Song.

When arranging house viewings and meetings, keeping up with messaging prospective tenants can take up a lot of time and energy. Elise AI's chatbot automates these interactions so they free up time for management teams to pursue more meaningful work. The tech has also been embraced by the healthcare industry, which experiences similar pain points for managing invoices and bills, as well as patient appointments.

Flo Health

HQ: London, United Kingdom

Total raised: $300 million

What it does: Flo is a digital women's health company, which provides a period tracking and wellness app.

What makes it promising: Flo became the first digital women's health company to hit a unicorn valuation in 2024, following a $200 million raise from General Atlantic.

The startup, which launched in 2015, ballooned in popularity as it offered a comprehensive suite of products, such as period tracking and personalized insights into reproductive health via its app. After Roe v. Wade was repealed, Flo developed an 'Anonymous Mode' setting that would allow users to access the app without associating any identifying information with their health data.

Following its fundraise in 2024, the startup is making a big hiring push in Lithuania — recruiting for over 100 roles in Vilnius. It will also expand its user base and double down on offerings for those with menopause.

Glean

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $560 million, according to the company

What it does: Glean makes search chatbots and agents for businesses, allowing workers to search for information across various systems and applications and create and summarize content.

What makes it promising: Glean's business is taking off as organizations seek quick productivity gains. Founded by a group of former Google Search engineers, Glean topped $100 million in annual recurring revenue last fiscal year, up from $50 million earlier in the year. The company plans to expand into new markets and verticals in 2025 to keep up its momentum.

Grow Therapy

HQ: New York City

Total raised: $178 million

What it does: Grow Therapy works with independent therapy practices to streamline their administrative tasks and connect patients with therapists covered by their insurance.

What makes it promising: Grow helps therapists start and run their own mental health practices. SignalFire founder and CEO Chris Farmer named Grow Therapy to Business Insider's list of the most promising healthcare AI startups of 2024, citing the startup's focus on handling administrative tasks "so therapists can focus on their patients and control their own schedule instead of being underworked and underpaid at someone else's practice."

Grow Therapy most recently raised $88 million in Series C funding in April, led by Sequoia Capital.

Harvey

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $500 million

What it does: Harvey is a developer of a generative AI legal tech platform for lawyers and paralegals to help with contract analysis, due diligence, litigation, and regulatory compliance.

What makes it promising: Many startups are attempting the herculean task of disrupting the legal industry, but Harvey is in the pole position. Backed by big-name investors like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, Harvey has ridden the AI wave to recently double its valuation to $3 billion in a fresh $300 million round of funding. In 2024, Harvey saw 4x annual recurring revenue growth and now has 235 customers in 42 countries.

Hue

HQ: Remote

Total raised: $4.5 million

What it does: Hue helps brands and retailers sell online by collecting user-generated video reviews and embedding that content into product pages.

What makes it promising: Hue is bringing the power of TikTok-style video reviews to brands and retailers, significantly increasing conversion rates and time spent on-site. Founded by a trio of women who come from the consumer industry they now serve, Hue closed on $4.5 million in seed funding last year from Fika Ventures, Underscore VC, and others.

Knime

HQ: Zurich, Switzerland

Total raised: $53.8 million

What it does: Knime has built a low-code, open-source data analytics platform for businesses.

What makes it promising: The startup is headquartered in Switzerland but has a global presence, with offices in Texas and Berlin. Its mission is to democratize data analytics and utilize generative AI to make that mission more accessible, cofounder and CEO Michael Berthold previously told Business Insider.

The startup raised $30 million in equity funding from Invus in August 2024 and serves over 400 enterprise customers — including the likes of Audi, Novartis, and P&G.

Landbase

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $12.5 million

What it does: Landbase uses AI agents to automate businesses' go-to-market procedures.

What makes it promising: Launched in 2023, Landbase has quickly applied the use of agentic AI to automating GTM strategies, training its GTM Omni model on billions of data points.

In July 2024, it raised a fresh $12.5 million from First Minute Capital and 8VC. It also recently acquired LavaReach, an AI-powered prospect research tool.

Legora, formerly Leya

HQ: Stockholm with offices in London

Total raised: $37 million

What it does: Lawyers use Legora to streamline legal work across reviewing, drafting, and research.

What makes it promising: Just months after graduating from the storied startup accelerator Y Combinator, Legora raised back-to-back rounds of funding from investors like Benchmark, Redpoint, and Jack Altman's fund Alt Capital. The company has so far grown its business in Europe and the US and is now quickly expanding to new markets. The website's careers page shows the company is hiring go-to-market managers in New York, Madrid, and London.

Midi Health

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $100 million

What it does: Midi partners with employers and health systems to provide virtual care for menopause.

What makes it promising: Midi is leading a growing market for menopause support as women's health investors expand their reach beyond fertility and maternal care. 18% of employers surveyed by Mercer said they plan to provide menopause benefits to employees in 2025, up from a measly 4% in 2023. Midi provides virtual services, including hormonal-replacement therapy and lifestyle support for those struggling with hormonal changes as they age, navigating symptoms like hot flashes and weight gain through perimenopause and menopause.

Midi also works with health systems to offer specialized telehealth services and coordinate care alongside a patient's in-person doctors. The startup raised a $63 million Series B round last year from dozens of angel investors, including actress Amy Schumer and former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, as well as VC firms like GV (Google Ventures) and Emerson Collective.

Neubird

HQ: Redwood City

Total raised: $44.5 million

What it does: Uses artificial intelligence to monitor, analyze, and resolve IT issues for companies.

What makes it promising: Hawkeye, the startup's AI-powered ITOps engineer, automates the detection and resolution of IT issues, freeing software engineers from routine troubleshooting. The startup's growing customer base includes both startups and large financial institutions, according to TechCrunch. The startup raised a $22.5 million seed extension round led by Microsoft's M12 in December, just eight months after raising a $22 million seed round from Mayfield, TechCrunch reported.

Nimble

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $221 million

What it does: Nimble develops fully autonomous e-commerce fulfillment centers powered by its warehouse robots that can retrieve inventory, pick items, pack orders, and sort packages.

What makes it promising: Backed by FedEd and Accel, Nimble is building a national network of next-generation robotic warehouses to provide faster, lower-cost logistics. It aims to solve a critical pain point for customers like Puma and AdoreMe, who are attempting to scale operations while facing a national shortage of warehouse workers. The company most recently raised $106 million in a round co-led by FedEx and Cedar Pine that propelled its valuation to $1 billion.

Norm Ai

HQ: New York

Total raised: $38 million

What it does: Builds AI agents to automate compliance tasks and regulatory assessments.

What makes it promising: Norm's AI platform takes complex regulations and converts them into code that can be parsed by computers, allowing companies to clearly explain compliance findings, for example. The startup raised three rounds of funding — a Series A and two follow-on investments — in just 11 months. Coatue Management led its $27 million Series A, and Bain Capital Ventures, Blackstone Innovations Investments, and others participated.

Please, formerly MultiOn

HQ: Palo Alto, California

Total raised: Undisclosed

What it does: Please develops an AI assistant that helps consumers with their plans, using agents to complete actions like booking trips and managing reservations.

What makes it promising: The startup, which rebranded from MultiOn to Please in January, develops web-based AI agents that are powered by LLMs. Major players like Amazon and General Catalyst invested in the company in a round that valued it at $100 million, The Information reported.

Reality Defender

HQ: New York

Total raised: $40 million

What it does: Reality Defender has developed a deepfake detection platform that spots AI-generated content.

What makes it promising: As the use of AI-generated content burgeons, the technology has also been increasingly used to create fraudulent content and misinformation. Reality Defender's platform can detect if something is AI-generated in images, text, video, and audio.

In particular, the startup has found a niche in providing its services to enterprise clients to help identify deepfakes. It has developed an API and web app that allows users to analyze content and gauge if it's been modified by AI; however, it doesn't directly discern if something is a deepfake. Rather, users are given inference points so they can determine the extent to which AI has altered something.

In October 2024, the startup raised a fresh $33 million to grow its offerings in the financial sector.

Remark

HQ: Boston

Total raised: $10 million

What it does: Remark develops a shopping guidance platform that connects shoppers with online product experts.

What makes it promising: Remark helps shoppers make purchase decisions by allowing them to asynchronously chat with product experts, both human and AI, simulating the experience of chatting with a sales associate at a brick-and-mortar store. The two-year-old company helps consumers looking to purchase items in the fashion, home goods, outdoor, baby products, beauty, and skincare industries, Remark told Business Insider. And it's already seeing promising results: Brands using Remark have seen a 10-12% revenue lift and a 30+% conversion rate, according to the company.

Robin AI

HQ: London and New York

Total raised: $71 million

What it does: Robin AI develops an AI legal assistant that drafts and analyzes contracts for companies and their legal teams.

What makes it promising: Robin AI announced not one but two rounds of funding in 2024: a $26 million Series B, led by Temasek, and a $25 million follow-on investment, with participation from Paypal Ventures and Cambridge University. The company's AI-powered platform helps in-house counsel teams and enterprises streamline their contract review processes. Richard Robinson, who worked as a lawyer at Clifford Chance, and James Clough, previously a machine learning researcher, founded the company in 2019.

Rogo

HQ: New York

Total raised: $27 million

What it does: Rogo develops an AI agent that helps Wall Street professionals with tasks such as company research and memo drafting.

What makes it promising: Investment banking may look high-octane on HBO's "Industry," but working on Wall Street is a grind. Enter Rogo. The AI-powered platform helps analysts quickly analyze earnings, construct market maps, and other tasks. Two of Rogo's cofounders, Gabe Stengel and John Willett, previously worked in investment banking. Investors include Khosla Ventures, Jack Altman's AltCapital, AlleyCorp, and BoxGroup.

Rox

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $50 million

What it does: Rox's team of AI sales assistants automates tasks and provides data-driven insights for sales teams.

What makes it promising: AI-powered tools like Rox are gaining traction with sales teams by reducing administrative work and improving deal execution. The company streamlines CRM updates, summarizes relevant news events, and drafts outreach in its platform, helping sales reps focus on closing deals rather than on tedious tasks. As of November 2024, over 35 enterprise sales teams from companies such as MongoDB and Ramp have used Rox. The startup raised both its seed round, led by Sequoia with participation from Google Ventures, and its Series A, led by General Catalyst, in stealth. It's currently in public beta.

Sierra

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $285 million

What it does: Seirra's AI-powered conversational agents interact with customers.

What makes it promising: Founded by OpenAI chairman and ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former Google executive Clay Bavor, Sierra's valuation soared to $4.5 billion at the end of 2024. Just don't call it a chatbot, as Taylor prefers to be thought of as "conversational AI." Whatever you call it, companies like ADT, Casper, and Sonos have used Sierra to handle customer service inquiries.

Skyfire

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $8.5 million

What it does: Skyfire is a payment network that lets AI agents autonomously spend money on behalf of their human counterparts.

What makes it promising: With AI agents expected to be a big theme in 2025, investors are excited about the types of tasks they can take over from humans. While other AI agents are handling customer service and sales calls, Skyfire is an early agentic player in the fintech space and is tackling the regulatory and societal considerations that come with giving a robot license to swipe a credit card.

Skyfire launched from stealth last summer and raised $8.5 million in seed funding from financial firms Neuberger Berman, DRW, and Brevan Howard Digital, plus Intersection Growth Partners, Arrington Capital, RedBeard Ventures, and others.

Smartcat

HQ: Amsterdam

Total raised: $75 million

What it does: Smartcat provides AI-generated translation services for businesses.

What makes it promising: For companies that want to scale globally, Smartcat offers a more cost-effective solution than hiring a gaggle of human translators. Smartcat's AI can translate both written and spoken words into more than 280 languages, making it easier to deploy corporate content, such as marketing materials and internal training videos, to office locations around the world.

Smartcat raised a $43 million Series C last year from Left Lane Capital, Koro Capital, Marbruck Investments, and Chrome Capital.

StackGen

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $12.3 million

What it does: StackGen uses AI to auto-generate infrastructure such as servers, databases, and networking from code.

What makes it promising: The AI revolution is coming for developers, with plenty of startups cropping up to help — and in some cases, replace — software engineers designing apps and building websites. StackGen is unique because it operates at the infrastructure layer of software development: Its AI reads code created by human developers and uses the information to generate technical infrastructure like servers and databases. StackGen raised $12.3 million last fall from a group of investors, including Thomvest Ventures, FireBolt Ventures, WestWave Capital, and Secure Octane.

Sublime Security

HQ: Washington, DC

Total raised: $94 million

What it does: Sublime's email security platform detects and prevents malicious behaviors in the inbox, enabling organizations to defend against phishing, email fraud, and other cyberattacks.

What makes it promising: Sublime's business has exploded as generative AI gives attackers a way to rapidly produce mass spear-phishing campaigns. The company has quadrupled its customer base over the past year and added enterprise customers like Elastic, Benteler, and SentinelOne to a roster of existing customers like Spotify, Reddit, and Brex. The company has won backing from top investors, including IVP, Index Ventures, and Slow Ventures.

SuperAGI

HQ: Newark, Delaware

Total raised: $15 million

What it does: SupaerAGI develops AI Agents for fully automated sales, marketing, support, and app development.

What makes it promising: SuperAGI got a big boost last year, picking up funding from Newlands VC, the secretive firm started by WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum. Aiming to supercharge business teams, SuperAGI is used by developers at Google, Tesla, OpenAI, and Microsoft.

Synthesia

HQ: London

Total raised: Over $350 million

What it does: Synthesia is an AI video creator that helps companies with tasks such as employee training, customer support, and sales.

What makes it promising: Founded in 2017, Synthesia was early to the generative AI boom. It reportedly doubled its valuation in 2024 and moved beyond video creation to help businesses solve a wider range of needs. More than 5,000 companies use Snythsia, from Heineken to Dupont to Zoom.

Together AI

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $232 million

What it does: Together AI has created an open-source generative AI and infrastructure platform for developing AI models. The company runs data centers suited specifically for AI workloads.

What makes it promising: The company most recently raised $106 million in a round led by Salesforce Ventures that saw its valuation cross the $1 billion mark. Other big-name investors include Coatue, Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Greycroft, and Nvidia. The startup is reportedly raising another round of funding that would value it at $3 billion.

Torq

HQ: New York

Total raised: $192 million

What it does: Torq has created autonomous security operations to help companies guard against cyber attacks.

What makes it promising: Torq achieved 300% revenue growth and increased its headcount by 200% in 2024, according to the company. It recently hired a new head of sales Usman Gulfaraz, to help the company get to $100 million in annual recurring revenue for 2026. Customers include Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inditex, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, and Siemens.

Unify

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $18.2 million

What it does: Unify is a developer of a performance management system for sales teams.

What makes it promising: Backed by OpenAI and Thrive Capital, Unify helps salespeople tailor "warm outbound" emails that are less likely to get lost in crowded email boxes. Unify's growing team includes ex-staffers from Spotify, Airbnb, and Ramp.

Vapi

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $20 million

What it does: Vapi is building an infrastructure tool for developers to build AI voice agents.

What makes it promising: Investors are foaming at the mouth to back promising AI agents, and one group of startups is specifically using the tech to understand spoken commands. One of these so-called AI voice agent startups is Vapi, which is creating a tool for developers to create, test, and deploy AI voice agents of their own that can be applied in a number of business settings, from reception desk to employee training to sales call.

Vapi raised $20 million at the end of 2024 from Bessemer Venture Partners. Abstract Ventures, AI Grant, Y Combinator, Saga Ventures, and Michael Ovitz.

Writer

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $326 million

What it does: Writer is a full-stack generative AI platform that gives businesses tools to create their own AI applications and automate other workflows.

What makes it promising: Writer has carved out a niche in enterprise AI and offers a secure, customizable generative AI platform tailored for businesses — which sets it apart from more generalist models like OpenAI. The company has attracted major clients, including Fortune 500 firms, by focusing on data privacy, compliance, and domain-specific AI solutions, and its recently released AI model emphasizes control, security, and enterprise-grade performance.

Writer raised a $200 million Series C in November 2024 from Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Workday Ventures, Accenture, Balderton, Insight Partners, and Vanguard. The round valued the startup at $1.9 billion.

7AI

HQ: Boston

Total raised: $36 million

What it does: 7AI uses AI agents to autonomously respond to alerts and investigate cyber threats on behalf of security operations teams.

What makes it promising: 7AI cofounders Lior Div and Yonatan Striem Amit previously cofounded Cyberreason, another cybersecurity company. 7AI raised a $36 million seed round in June 2024 that valued the company at over $100 million. The financing was led by Greylock Partners, with participation from Spark Capital and CRV.

• Pulse raised $3.9 million to enhance unstructured data preparation for machine learning models.
• The startup addresses the demand for custom copilots and agents using internal enterprise data.
• Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross led the seed funding round for Pulse.

Pulse, a five-person startup specializing in unstructured data preparation for machine learning models, has raised $3.9 million in a funding round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.

Pulse sells businesses a toolkit designed to convert raw, unstructured data into formats ready for use by machine learning models. This addresses the growing demand for enterprises to build custom copilots, chatbots, and digital agents tailored to their internal data.

"Let's say you're a financial institution or a healthcare company. There is no room for an LLM to make something up or hallucinate a number or an error," said Sid Manchkanti, cofounder and CEO of Pulse.

Before Pulse, Manchkanti was a software developer at Nvidia. He started the company with his childhood friend, Ritvik Pandey, who previously worked on Tesla's supercomputer project for training machine learning models, called Dojo.

Other investors in the company's seed round include Y Combinator, Sequoia Scout, Soma Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, the venture capital firm founded by Joe Montana, and individuals from Nvidia, OpenAI, and fintech startup Ramp.

Training data is the raw material that enables large language models to learn the relationships between words and phrases and mimic human-like text. However, training these models isn't just about feeding them massive amounts of information. It takes curating and preparing information in the right way. You don't put diesel in a gas engine.

Structured data is organized and searchable data that fits neatly into rows and columns, like data in an Excel spreadsheet or customer records. Unstructured data looks more like the files you work with on a daily basis. Think pages-long customer contracts, employee handbooks, sales presentations, and product demo videos. According to the tech market intelligence firm IDC, 90% of the world's data is unstructured.

The conversion of messy data into training data often involves human workers. They may read through documents and images, enter relevant information into formats such as spreadsheets or databases, and review and clean the data — correcting errors and labeling the data to provide context for machine learning applications.

To automate this process, Pulse's solution uses computer vision techniques and fine-tuned extraction models to understand complex documents and accurately parse their data.

Manchkanti says Pulse's technology not only streamlines the process — making it faster and more efficient for businesses to leverage their unstructured data in machine learning models — but also improves accuracy. He estimates that teams lose 20% to 30% of their data with existing solutions due to poor extraction.

Pulse's round builds on a swell of money into startups offering tools to eliminate this unstructured data bottleneck. Unstructured has raised $65 million in funding to date and counts over a thousand paying customers. Instabase recently secured $100 million in funding to expand its toolkit for extracting and processing unstructured data.

Manchkanti said the new money put into Pulse would allow the company to hire engineers and add data extraction for other formats, namely audio and video.

• Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, has launched Thinking Machines Lab.
• Her new startup focuses on human-AI collaboration and maintaining high standards for AI safety.
• Murati has hired top talent from Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Thinking Machines Lab, a new company created by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, emerged from stealth on Tuesday.

In a blog post, the startup positioned itself as an artificial intelligence research and product lab focused on making these systems more accessible.

"To bridge the gaps, we're building Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable," Murati wrote.

From the moment Murati stepped away from OpenAI, venture capitalists started circling the machine learning maven, vying to be among the first to offer checks to her new company.

In just a few months, Murati has assembled a team of machine learning researchers and engineers from Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other tech goliaths. The company reunites several of Murati's former coworkers, including John Schulman, who co-led the creation of ChatGPT; Jonathan Lachman, formerly the head of special projects at OpenAI; and Alexander Kirillov, who worked closely with Murati on ChatGPT's voice mode.

In the post, Murati said the startup would "emphasize human-AI collaboration" and "build multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively." She also said the startup would contribute to AI safety by "maintaining a high safety bar" that prevents the misuse of the company's released models, sharing best practices on how to build safe AI systems, and adding to external safety research.

• Shotsy is a first-of-its-kind app for tracking the use of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy.
• Software engineer Aja Beckett built the app out of necessity after finding manual notetaking clumsy.
• The company now has $2 million in fresh funding to ramp up marketing efforts and grow its team.

When Aja Beckett started using a GLP-1 medication, she took notes on her phone to track her doses, side effects, and hunger. As her notes became long and unruly, Beckett, who was working as a software engineer for The Athletic, decided to build an app instead.

Today, that app, Shotsy, has been downloaded over 100,00 times and has reached a revenue run rate of $1 million — a projection of yearly revenue based on current revenue numbers. The app is available to download and use for free and offers additional features that can be accessed through a $19.99 annual subscription. Beckett says the eight-month-old company is profitable.

Investors are taking notice. Shotsy has raised $2.25 million in seed funding to ramp up marketing and grow its team, the startup tells Business Insider exclusively. April Underwood of Adverb Ventures led the round, while Coalition Operators, Springbank Collective, and angel investor Esther Dyson participated.

The excitement around weight-loss drugs has both Big Pharma and Silicon Valley chasing the Wegovy wave. The telehealth unicorn startup Virta Health recently began prescribing Ozempic for weight loss in a push toward profitability. Omada Health, which works with employers and health plans to deliver better care to people with type 2 diabetes, said employer interest in its weight-loss program is behind its latest growth spurt. And on Super Bowl Sunday, ads for junk food and beer shared airtime with a controversial Hims & Hers spot promoting its version of the popular weight-loss drug.

But even as startups rush to capitalize on this supersized market, there hasn't been a basic app for tracking medication use. Beckett knows this firsthand.

Beckett, 43, said she's struggled with her weight for years and cycled through diets like keto and Weight Watchers. She became curious about Ozempic after reading about these drugs in the news. Thirteen months ago, she began using Zepbound, an injectable branded to treat obesity.

Beckett kicked her Dr. Pepper habit almost overnight. As she lost weight, a bum ankle that had bothered her for years was no longer sensitive. She also noticed that she could think more clearly without the "food noise."

She started tracking her weekly injections in the Notes app on her phone. Beckett noted that side effects like nausea peaked at different lengths of time after her shot, and by logging her doses, she could estimate when she would feel ill and plan accordingly. She also tracked her injection sites to make sure she rotated body areas and how much weight she lost per shot.

But the Notes app left her wanting. So she built an app, saying that her fading obsession with food gave her more energy on nights and weekends to code.

Beckett also became active on a Reddit group for Zepbound users. She invited other members to take the app for a test drive. The excitement was palpable, and the feedback poured in.

"Nobody else was providing any tools for specifically GLP-1 users," Beckett said. "So it was really exciting for all of us in the community to feel seen."

Shotsy saw 3,000 downloads in the first 24 hours after its App Store debut.

Still working full-time, Beckett used some of the subscription proceeds to hire a part-time designer to improve the app's look. The app continued to rack up downloads. She felt comfortable quitting her job when the app generated enough revenue to replace her software engineering salary.

"It started to feel like I was missing out on an opportunity to do everything I wanted to do with Shotsy," Beckett said.

By chance, she ran into an engineer friend and gave him a demo while traveling through an airport on her return from a developer conference. He asked to connect her to some investors, including Underwood, the former Slack head of product.

Shotsy clicked with the investor for a few reasons. It tapped into an emerging market that Swiss bank UBS says could eclipse 40 million people by 2029. Shotsy was the first to market with an app consumers were craving, as evidenced by the Reddit love. And it had a founder solving a problem she understood from experience.

"She needed it, she built it. It's gotten incredible traction as a side hustle," Underwood said. "She now has cash in the bank that allows her to build a team around her that is going to be able to extend the capabilities of the app to make it more useful and stickier, reach more audiences, and address more needs."

Beckett said Shotsy has only scratched the surface of its product road map, but she didn't comment on what that may include. Ashley Mayer, a general partner at Coalition Operators who led its Shotsy investment, said that the most important thing Shotsy can do now is create a product that users love.

"If you earn people's trust and you accompany them on a journey that is life-changing and emotional," said Mayer, Glossier's former communications boss, "you earn the right to build other experiences for them or help them in other ways."

• Glean has launched tools for building and managing digital agents that carry out tasks on their own.
• The company faces competition from Google, Snowflake, and Dropbox in enterprise search.
• Glean's new features include agent libraries and real-time internet search.

Glean is going all in on digital agents.

The enterprise software unicorn on Wednesday unveiled a new suite of tools for businesses to build, deploy, and manage digital agents. The company continues rolling out new products in the face of competition from Google, Snowflake, Dropbox, and others.

Glean's service lets employees query all their enterprise data. It tunnels through the customer's various systems and applications at unbelievable speeds and summarizes the findings.

The company has been testing new reasoning capabilities for several months with a select group of customers. It's now releasing some of those features widely.

Employees can describe a task using plain language, and Glean parses the prompt into smaller tasks and takes steps to achieve the desired outcome. For example, an employee can tell the Glean chatbot, "prep for my one-on-one with Tina." Glean blasts through their shared emails, Slack messages, Google Docs, Figma files, and other sources to suss out what topics should be addressed and then writes an agenda for the meeting.

The employee can save this "agent," basically a set of instructions, to their workspace and recall it at any time. They can also configure the agent's settings to run ahead of every one-on-one with Tina and drop a link to the agenda in the calendar event.

Emrecan Dogan, Glean's head of product, said the company has just begun to deliver on the promise of what agents can really do.

"Your agents are working for you while you are asleep," Dogan told Business Insider on a call earlier in the week.

Founded by a team of former Google search engineers, Glean began its life as "Google search for businesses." The rub is that Google has since entered that space. It's made numerous upgrades to the Google Cloud platform, enabling developers to build search into their applications. The Information reported in November that Google is preparing to launch a new enterprise search product to compete directly with Glean's.

The new agent environment is part of Glean's strategy to offer more powerful software features to customers as it faces mounting competition. The company said last week that it crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in the 2024 fiscal year.

On the call with Business Insider, Dogan demonstrated other use cases that leverage Glean's latest release. He prompted the chatbot to prepare a table comparing Glean to Candian rival Coveo for a sales call. In seconds, it combed internal data sources and searched the web to prepare the table, all while showing on-screen the steps it took in real time.

The new release also includes an agent library designed to help workers get started with pre-built agents. Employees can share custom agents with their teams so workers don't waste precious time if, Dogan said, "somebody spent the brain cycles to come up with a better agent."

• Tech startups like Perplexity, You.com, and Liner aim to challenge Google's dominance in search.
• They're now enlisting college students to promote and endorse their brands on campuses.
• To win over young people is one strategy to win the market.

As Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others rush to build a more powerful search engine, smaller tech rivals are trying a well-worn strategy to spur growth: using college students to help convert people into faithful users.

In the past year, startups like Perplexity, You.com, and Liner, which is South Korea's search equivalent, have recruited hundreds of students to promote and endorse their services. These "campus ambassadors" post flyers, throw hackathons and speaker events, and give away fast food and merch in exchange for signing up.

Perplexity's downloads have been helped by guerilla marketing tactics that specifically target students. Greg Feingold, the company's head of community, says a successful back-to-school campaign pulled in over 50,000 sign-ups for a free month of Perplexity Pro. By December, the three-year-old search and chatbot developer saw usage surge among American students, with millions of queries sent each week.

"They're a substantial part of our user base," Feingold said, "and also they come back to the product a lot. It's so tied to what they are using the internet for, which is research, studying, this kind of knowledge work that Perplexity is built for."

As of March 2024, Perplexity had around 15 million monthly active users; it declined to give a more recent user total. The company was last valued at around $9 billion in a funding round led by IVP.

Building a viral app all but requires buy-in from teens, tweens, and twenty-somethings. By now, most of them have heard of ChatGPT. It's been over two years since the chatbot's public launch dazzled the tech world. And the use of ChatGPT is ticking up, particularly among younger people. About a quarter of American teens say they've used ChatGPT for schoolwork, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in the fall.

Enlisting students allows ChatGPT's rivals to reach trendsetters who have access to thousands of other students through their dorms, mailing lists, private WhatsApp groups, and classes. This strategy mirrors the tactics used by iconic apps like Facebook, Snapchat, and Tinder.

"This is the generation that has grown up with tech in their lives," said Emma Yee Yick, global community lead at startup Notion, where she's run a campus ambassador program these past three years. "And so now they're in college, and they are the ones who are going to decide what tools we use in the future."

ChatGPT, but better

Liner is one of the most popular search engines you've never heard of. With over 10 million users globally, Andreessen Horowitz recognized it as the fourth-most widely used generative AI web product last year. The app works similarly to Perplexity but instead of combing large swaths of the internet, it narrows its search to credible sources like academic papers and government databases.

But as a South Korean startup, Liner's name barely registers outside some higher education circles. The company's campus ambassador program aims to change that.

Every week, Kristine Zhou, a sophomore and Liner ambassador at the University of California, Berkeley, hangs outside the student center with a laptop and a party tray of Chick-fil-A. She offers demos to students passing by, reeling them in with free chicken sandwiches. But the real hook, said Zhou, is Liner's focus on providing users with reliable content.

The program kicked off last semester at four California universities, which the company picked for their proximity to Liner employees in San Francisco, said Alex Yoon, head of US operations.

With Perplexity, student evangelists focus on practical applications when tabling on the quad or speaking to a club. Arthita Ghosh, a graduate student at Chicago Booth in London on an exchange term, engages students by asking about their travel plans. She uses the app to swiftly generate a two-day itinerary with must-see attractions, travel times, and costs.

Isis Decrem, a computer science major at the University of Chicago, emphasizes the versatility of Perplexity. She demonstrates the ability to switch between models within the app to vary the outcome.

You.com is also in the business of search but doesn't call itself a search engine. Founded by two former Stanford machine learning researchers, the company makes a digital workspace for conducting research, creating content, and building custom agents to perform tasks on their own. To help grow its foothold, You.com leverages campus ambassadors at 18 universities, including Stanford, New York University, and Georgia Tech.

Vishal Makhijani, You.com's chief operating officer, notes that if the program works as it should, the company should see benefits for years to come.

"You.com is trying to be the leading productivity platform for knowledge workers, and college students are just knowledge workers in a year or two," said Makhijani, who was the longtime chief executive of online education company Udacity.

Those loyal users might continue using You.com in their first jobs, streamlining the company's efforts to sell into organizations and shortening sales cycles, said Makhijani.

Goodies and goodwill

To be sure, the unspoken goal of competitors in this market is to secure a second-place finish. Google is the dominant search engine, with a 90% share of the global search market.

While these startups may not dethrone Google as the go-to search engine, their efforts are far from futile, especially for the student ambassadors involved.

Though the position is usually unpaid (Liner pays students $20 an hour), the student ambassador will likely benefit from free subscriptions, logo apparel, virtual events with company leaders, and the opportunity to link their name with a buzzy startup. In today's frozen job market, many students believe working as a campus ambassador helps bridge the gap to their ideal employers.

Perplexity saw an over 600% increase in applications for its spring semester program compared to the fall, according to Feingold, Perplexity's community lead. The program now boasts "hundreds" of ambassadors across the globe, from Egypt to France to South Africa.

The ambassador program's reach is reflected not just in numbers but also in daily student life. At the MIT Sloan School of Management, Honey Pamnani knew she'd made an impact during class when her professor answered a student's question with a simple directive.

"Just Perplexity it."

• Glean hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year after doubling its customer base.
• Enterprise search is a competitive field, with players like Google and OpenAI.
• Glean plans to expand into new markets and verticals to sustain growth.

Glean, a company that makes search chatbots and agents for businesses, said it achieved an annual recurring revenue of $100 million in its last fiscal year. That's up from hitting $50 million ARR, or the yearly value of last month's revenue, in 2024.

A company that began as "Google search for the workplace" has more than doubled its customer base in the past year alone and was most recently valued at $4.6 billion in a funding round that included Altimeter, Kleiner Perkins, Sapphire Ventures, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. It has become a daily use product for hundreds of customers, including Databricks, Duolingo, and Plaid.

Glean is part of a select group of AI startups seeing fast-growing revenue and strong investor interest. Anysphere, the 3-year-old startup behind the AI coding assistant Cursor, recently was valued at $2.5 billion and hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue, The New York Times reported last month. The AI legal startup Harvey is raising a new round at a $3 billion valuation and was bringing in $50 million in annual recurring revenue as of December, The Information said.

Enterprise search has become a key battleground for a wide variety of businesses, such as Google, Snowflake, and Dropbox. OpenAI last year bought an enterprise search startup that could help ChatGPT compete more directly with Glean.

Glean's business has grown as organizations grasp the enormous potential of artificial intelligence to provide quick productivity gains, Arvind Jain, Glean's founder and CEO, said. The company often sells to customers who are just getting their feet wet and buying their first pure AI software, Jain added.

He said they say, "'Can I just have an assistant like ChatGPT but something that is knowledgeable about my company, my employees, everything?' That's what Glean is."

Employees today rely on various systems and applications to do their work. These systems produce large amounts of data that's often siloed, which makes it challenging for employees to find information quickly. Glean's service allows workers to search across these disparate data sources and create and summarize content.

Glean says it avoids the issue of hallucinations through a technique called retrieval-augmented generation. This framework gathers relevant information from external knowledge sources and feeds it to a large language model to write a response. In the past year, Glean has baked in agentic reasoning, which describes the ability of artificial intelligence systems to break up queries into steps and execute a plan to train "agents" for specific tasks.

Room to grow

Glean has projected annual recurring revenue of $200 million to $250 million by the end of 2025, a person with direct knowledge of the business' financials said.

Jain didn't comment on the specific numbers but said there were several areas where Glean was targeting its next pockets of growth. It's reaching into new markets, such as Japan and Europe, where Jain said it already had some customers.

The company is hiring several account executives in those regions and a partner manager in Japan to work with software resellers and consultancies that help customers implement Glean's technology.

Glean will also need to expand beyond its base of technology companies to sustain its growth. Jain said Glean had customers in verticals such as healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and financial services and would continue to push into new areas.

• OpenAI said it was investigating whether DeepSeek inappropriately used its AI outputs.
• DeepSeek built AI models using less-advanced chips at a fraction of the cost of US rivals.
• "We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology," OpenAI said.

OpenAI is investigating whether DeepSeek inappropriately trained its powerful AI models using the US startup's technology.

A spokesperson for OpenAI said the company was reviewing the matter closely and would take "aggressive, proactive countermeasures" to protect its AI models from improper use.

"We know that groups in the PRC (People's Republic of China) are actively working to use methods, including what's known as distillation, to try to replicate advanced US AI models," the spokesperson wrote in an email. "We are aware of and reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and will share information as we know more."

DeepSeek built top-performing AI models using less-advanced chips at what it says is a fraction of the cost of rivals such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta. The news has hammered some tech stocks this week and put a big question mark over massive spending on AI chips and related infrastructure.

It's a particular challenge to OpenAI because DeepSeek's models are priced way below the US startup's offerings.

OpenAI lets developers with a valid license integrate its proprietary models into their own applications. Its terms of use, however, prohibit developers from using outputs from its models to develop any models that directly compete with its products and services.

David Sacks, the White House's artificial-intelligence and crypto czar, told Fox News it was possible that DeepSeek had engaged in intellectual property theft.

"We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology and will continue working closely with the US government to protect the most capable models being built here," the OpenAI spokesperson told BI on Wednesday.

Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that Microsoft notified OpenAI that its security researchers in the fall had observed individuals they believed may be affiliated with DeepSeek siphoning a large amount of data using OpenAI's application programming interface, or API.

• Delve launches from stealth with $3 million in funding to automate compliance evidence collection.
• Legacy systems require teams to manually collect screenshots; Delve uses AI agents to automate.
• Delve says it has reached a revenue run rate of over $1 million and has signed 100+ customers.

Delve, a San Francisco startup that uses artificial intelligence agents to collect and verify compliance evidence for businesses, just launched from stealth with $3.3 million in funding, the startup tells Business Insider exclusively.

Businesses handling data at scale need to collect and submit a variety of documents to show compliance with data and security standards. Legacy systems for gathering this evidence require teams to manually collect screenshots of security configurations.

"Compliance is one of those industries that's silently waiting for its revolution," said Selin Kocalar, a cofounder and chief operating officer of Delve.

Delve says it saves customers hours of busywork by using agents — software that can perform specific tasks without much human intervention — to collect evidence across web apps, internal tools, and custom software. For example, a customer can write a single instruction and Delve's agents automatically collect the required screenshots. The platform continuously monitors the customer's tech stack and alerts team members of compliance gaps before they affect security.

Delve says it has reached a revenue run rate of several million dollars and has signed over a hundred customers, including 11x, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed sales automation platform and Bland, a startup developing agents for phone-based tasks. Delve investors include Y Combinator, General Catalyst, FundersClub, and Soma Capital.

The startup's founders, Kocalar and Karun Kaushik, met as classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and started working on a medical scribe solution. They saw up close the pains of showing compliance with HIPAA, a federal law that protects the privacy and security of health information, and decided to switch to building Delve.

According to Kocalar, the platform now covers SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, GDPR, PCI DSS, and custom frameworks, with additional certifications in the works.

Businesses are increasingly turning to agents like Salesforce's Agentforce and Microsoft's Copilot to help them automate tasks and offload busywork. Investors are taking notice. In 2024, according to PitchBook data, startups exploring the application of agents raised $8.2 billion in funding. Some of that money flowed to startups in compliance, such as Norm Ai, which converts regulations from public laws to company policies into working computer code, and Greenlite, which applies agents to financial compliance.

• LinkedIn is gaining traction among venture capitalists for networking and brand building.
• More than half of investors on the Forbes Midas List are posting at least monthly on LinkedIn.
• A ghostwriter for startup investors says LinkedIn gives founders a clear sense of their mindset.

X has long been the virtual water cooler where tech founders and investors come to network, crow about success, or meme the latest Paul Graham essay. While it still reigns supreme in the venture capitalist's hierarchy of social media platforms — when it comes to polishing a brand that helps them stand out in a crowded field — more and more dealmakers are also embracing LinkedIn.

According to a study by the global advisory firm Milltown Partners, LinkedIn and X are seeing shifts in how often investors on the Forbes Midas List are posting. In 2024, 55% of these top VCs posted on LinkedIn at least once a month. That's on par with the 54% of investors posting monthly on X, although that platform saw the number of VCs posting daily on X halved.

Maren Bannon of January Ventures hasn't posted on X in a year, despite having many thousands of followers, because she said the "ROI" of posting is unclear. "I have become more active on LinkedIn," Bannon said, "because that's where the people I want to reach are spending time." She's not the only one.

The venture capitalist Henri Pierre-Jacques said he used to tweet twice a day but dialed it back last year. He noticed that his tweets weren't getting as much traction after X pushed an update so that when people open the app, they see a stream of tweets from people they don't follow. "I don't post nearly as much on Twitter anymore because it's not worth it," Pierre-Jacques said. (He still posts often.)

On LinkedIn, Pierre-Jacques, a managing director of Harlem Capital, shares a hodgepodge of fund news, career advice, and family photos. His recent accounting of what he's learned from the billionaires in his network garnered 1,100 likes and 96 comments. "I used to go to Twitter for big reach, now I go to LinkedIn," he said.

LinkedIn is where the major links of the funding food chain intersect, according to Alexa von Tobel, a managing partner of Inspired Capital. Founders are looking for their next hire. Investors like Pierre-Jacques are searching the platform for free agents working at "Stealth Startup" with the hope of backing the next big thing. And investors of pensions, endowments, and other institutions that supply the capital for venture funds say they're using the site in the course of their diligence.

Institutional investors surveyed around the globe said LinkedIn has a greater impact on future investment decisions than any other digital channel, save for a company's investor relations website, according to a 2023 survey from PR firm Brunswick Group.

"For us, we're a small fund, so we don't have a marketing budget," said Jenny Fielding, a managing partner of Everywhere Ventures. She said a tier-one investor can afford to hire marketers or sponsor conferences to raise its profile. "Our best asset is really the personal brands of our team," Fielding said, "so we just try to get the word out about issues that are important to us and to our key stakeholder, which is the founder."

As LinkedIn gets bigger, other investors are shelling out to make an impression. "LinkedIn used to be a nice-to-have, and we're realizing more and more that it's a need-to-have," said Alyssa Greenfield, a ghostwriter who authors LinkedIn posts for tech investors and founders. Her regular clients meet with her monthly to riff on what's new and brainstorm ideas, but she said some of her most inspired content comes out of a quick text from an investor after meeting a founder.

Greenfield's business has ballooned in the last year, with much of the inbound coming from small, lesser-known firms. She recently signed a firm as a client to build up the LinkedIn presence of six or seven partners. "They're feeling like the best founders out there are not going to give them the time of day if there's no content from their partners online that gives them a sense of what it might be like to work with them," Greenfield said.

Founders know what they're getting when they read Hunter Walk on LinkedIn. The super angel, whose early investments include Plaid, Gusto, and Chime, became a LinkedIn "influencer" in 2012 and now counts 870,000 followers. His near-constant stream of insights, sardonic quips, and cartoons serves as an open invitation into his investor mindset, giving founders a clear indicator of whether their values align with his.

Although Walk said he's not looking for an explicit return on LinkedIn, he believes that posting helps him stay "passively top of mind" in the high-tech circles he runs in. "Hopefully, that reminds them to follow up with me outside of LinkedIn," Walk said.

• TRAC developed an AI model to predict the startups most likely to become unicorns.
• The firm has updated its list to reveal 30 new startups in 2025 that the model identified.
• TRAC says the companies it identifies have a one-in-five probability of becoming a unicorn.

Even though venture capitalists invest in tech, they have traditionally chosen early-stage investments that are decidedly low-tech, based largely on gut feelings, founder background, and personal relationships.

TRAC, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm cofounded by Fred Campbell, Joseph Aaron, Scott Pyne, Steve Marek, and Dick Fredericks in 2020, wants to change that.

The firm developed a proprietary model that uses AI to predict which early-stage startups are most likely to become unicorns, companies valued at more than a billion dollars. In 2023, TRAC first revealed 30 of the startups its model identified exclusively with Insider and also revealed its methodology. This year, the firm agreed to provide an updated list.

A few things are surprising about TRAC's model, which is based on over 30 sources of both public and private data that Aaron calls "Moneyball for venture capital."

For one thing, the firm says it is much more effective to focus on which startups are not likely to succeed versus picking the winners.

"Our algorithms are not really selecting needles from a haystack, as much as removing all the hay," Aaron explained. "Our AI eliminates about 99% of all early-stage companies from consideration, because our data predicts these companies have a higher probability of failure."

Another surprising thing about TRAC's model is it does not value founders as predictive. Instead, it finds the 291,000 investors in its database much more useful for determining a startup's success, especially a tiny number of just about 247 top angel investors and firms it calls "SuperForecasters."

"These extraordinary investors make a profit on two-thirds of their positions and one in five of their investments returns over 10X," Aaron explained.

While TRAC declined to share the full list of SuperForecasters it did share a random sampling of 30 of them with BI last year.

Less than 2% of all startups attract a SuperForecaster so that eliminates over 98% of all startups from TRAC's formula.

How accurate is TRAC's formula? Like early-stage investing as a whole, it takes a long time to know who is truly good at their job because venture investing is typically judged after a decade or more.

The firm says the companies it identifies have a one-in-five probability of becoming a unicorn, and it has been especially good at eliminating false positives, or an investment that goes bust.

"Most early-stage companies fail within 18 months of raising a round," Aaron said. "Similar vintage early-stage VCs would have had upwards of 20% of their portfolio be false positive within the first few years."

From the 2023 list, some of the companies listed have already achieved unicorn status or come close. Legal AI startup Harvey AI was valued at $1.5 billion in 2024. AI startup Hebbia raised $130 million at a $700 million valuation in 2024.

TRAC says it has made 61 seed investments, and none have lost money. "

"That is the only stat we have with bragging rights," Aaron said.

Here is the updated list of 30 companies in 2025 TRAC's model identified as being the next unicorns, in alphabetical order. The companies all have a valuation of less than $270 million. The average valuation is $149 million.

Amplify

What it does: Comprehensive life insurance platform

Founded: 2019

Last post-money valuation: $90 million, according to the company

Total raised: $45 million, according to the company

CEO: Hannah Wu

Founders: Hannah Wu and Qiyun Cai

Select investors: Greycroft, Anthemis, Mana Ventures, Crosslink Capital

Anrok

What it does: Global sales tax platform specifically built for software companies

Founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: $250 million, according to the company

Total raised: $54 million, according to the company

CEO: Michelle Valentine

Founders: Michelle Valentine and Kannan Goundan

Select investors: Khosla Ventures, Elad Gil, Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital

Beacons

What it does: E-commerce platform and online solutions for creators

Founded: 2019

Last post-money valuation: $123 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $30 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Neal Jean

Founders: Neal Jean, David Zeng, Greg Luppescu, Jesse Zhang

Select investors: Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Kora, Mantis VC

Beehiiv

What it does: Helps people publish newsletters

Founded: 2021

Last post-money valuation: $225 million, according to the company

Total raised: $49.7 million, according to the company

CEO: Tyler Denk

Founders: Tyler Denk, Jacob Hurd, Benjamin Hargett

Select investors: New Enterprise Associates, Sapphire Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Scott Galloway

Cal.com

What it does: Open-source scheduling infrastructure for various business sectors

Founded: 2021

Last post-money valuation: $175 million, according to the company

Total raised: $32.5 million, according to the company

President: Bailey Pumfleet

Founders: Bailey Pumfleet and Peer Richelsen

Select investors: Seven Seven Six, OSS Capital, Obvious Ventures, Tribe Capital, Alex Bouaziz, Jack Altman, Anthony Pompliano

Canary Technologies

What it does: Guest management platform and operational workflows for hotels

Founded: 2018

Last post-money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $97 million, according to the company

CEO: Harman Singh Narula

Founders: SJ Sawhney and Harman Singh Narula

Select investors: Insight Partners, F-Prime Capital, Y Combinator

Databento

What it does: Distributes market data from over 45 trading exchanges

Founded: 2019

Last post-money valuation: $110 million, according to the company

Total raised: $37 million, according to the company

CEO: Christina Qi

Founders: Christina Qi and Luca Lin

Select investors: Redpoint Ventures, Unusual Ventures, Indicator Ventures, Tribe Capital, Operator Collective

Factory

What it does: Helps organizations manage and automate their software development

Founded: 2023

Last post-money valuation: $120 million, according to the company

Total raised: $20 million, according to the company

CEO: Matan Grinberg

Founders: Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes

Select investors: Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, Mantis VC, Ali Ghodsi

Fieldguide

What it does: Workflow automation software for assurance and advisory firms

Founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $50 million, according to the company

CEO: Jin Chang

Founders: Jin Chang and Chris Szymansky

Select investors: Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, Y Combinator, Floodgate, Elad Gil, Justin Kan

FlutterFlow

What it does: Low-code platform for mobile app developers

Founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: $170 million, according to the company

Total raised: $30 million, according to the company

CEO: Abel Mengistu

Founders: Alex Greaves and Abel Mengistu

Select investors: GV, CRV, Gradient Ventures, Xoogler Ventures, Y Combinator

Goldcast

What it does: Helps companies conduct and measure their event marketing efforts

Founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: $119 million, according to the company

Total raised: $40 million, according to the company

CEO: Palash Soni

Founders: Kishore Kothandaraman, Palash Soni, and Aashish Srinivas

Select investors: Underscore VC, Unusual Ventures, Westbridge Capital, HubSpot Ventures, Manik Gupta, Lenny Rachitsky, Scott Belsky, Elias Torres

K2 Space

What it does: Developing satellites that can deliver heavy payloads into orbit

Founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $71 million, according to the company

CEO: Karan Kunjur

Founders: Karan Kunjur and Neel Kunjur

Select investors: Altimeter Capital, Alpine Space Ventures, First Round Capital, Republic Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Also Capital

Lumos

What it does: Provides identity management software across a company's entire workforce and apps

Founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: $205 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $65.3 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Andrej Safundzic

Founders: Alan Flores-López, Leo Mehr, and Andrej Safundzic

Select investors: Andreessen Horowitz, Scale Venture Partners, Neo

Legacy

What it does: Provides at-home sperm testing and freezing services

Founded: 2018

Last post-money valuation: $150 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $47.87 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Khaled Kteily

Founder: Khaled Kteily

Select Investors: Bain Capital, Alumni Ventures, TRAC, FirstMark

Mermaid Chart

What it does: Uses AI for visual diagramming

Founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $9.5 million, according to PitchBook

Founder: Knut Sveidqvist

Select investors: Sequoia, M12, Open Core Ventures

Neurable

What it does: Makes neurotechnology headphones that capture brain data and tell the user about their cognitive performance

Founded: 2015

Last post-money valuation: $23.5 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $30.9 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Ramses Alcaide

Founders: Adam Molnar and Ramses Alcaide

Select investors: Trac, Deepwater Asset Management

Nexus Laboratories

What it does: Developing a verifiable computing system that will bring greater ownership and identity protection to all users online

Founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: Unknown, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $27.2 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Daniel Marin

Founder: Daniel Marin

Select investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, SV Angel

Optery

What it does: Privacy management software that gives individuals control of their personal data

Founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: $7.14 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $2.7 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Lawrence Gentilello

Founders: Lawrence Gentilello, Chen Atlas, and Dekel Barzilay

Select investors: Y Combinator, Trac, Goodwater Capital

Orb

What it does: Offers real-time billing solutions for AI and software companies

Founded: 2021

Last post-money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $44.1 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Alvaro Morales

Founders: Kshitij Grover and Alvaro Morales

Select investors: Greylock, Menlo Ventures, Mayfield

Otto

What it does: Software designed to help veterinary clinics deliver better care

Founded: 2015

Last post-money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $43 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Zeynep Young

Founders: Steven Carter and Price Fallin

Select investors: Mercury Fund, Dundee Venture Capital, Atento Capital

Peregrine Technologies

What it does: Enables local police departments and public safety agencies to manage and visualize their data

Founded: 2018

Last post-money valuation: $360 million, according to the company

Total raised: $60 million, according to the company

CEO: Nicholas Noone

Founders: Nicholas Noone and Ben Rudolph

Select investors: Friends & Family Capital, Fifth Down Capital, Goldcrest Capital, Craft Ventures, Godfrey Capital

Pylon

What it does: Customer operations platform that broadcasts product updates and upcoming events and collects data

Founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: $86.06 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $19.37 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Advitheey Chelikani

Founders: Advith Chelikani, Marty Kausas, and Robert Eng

Select investors: Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Y Combinator

Rad AI

What it does: Generative AI to help healthcare providers manage their workflow

Founded: 2018

Last post-money valuation: $273.49 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $83.99 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Doktor Gurson

Founders: Dr. Jeff Chang and Doktor Gurson

Select investors: Khosla Ventures, Gradient Ventures

Render

What it does: Cloud hosting platform that helps developers create apps quickly and easily

Founded: 2018

Last post-money valuation: $230 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $156.8 million, according to the company

CEO and founder: Anurag Goel

Select investors: Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Abstract Ventures, Elad Gil

Runa

What it does: Payments Infrastructure within the financial technology sector, offering embedded payouts, rewards, and incentives

Founded: 2016

Last post-money valuation: $100 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $54 million, according to the company

CEO and founder: Aron Alexander

Select investors: Albion, SAP.io, Clocktower

Runpod

What it does: provides cloud GPU computing services

Founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: $120 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $20 million, according to PitchBook

CEO and founder: Zhen Lu

Select investors: Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital

Stairwell

What it does: cybersecurity company

Founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: $300 million, according to Pitchbook

Total raised: $70 million, according to PitchBook

CEO and founder: Mike Wiacek

Select investors: Accel, Lux Capital, Sequoia Capital

Starfish Space

What it does: It develops technology that helps satellites last longer, including refueling satellites and manually altering their orbits for safe disposal.

Founded: 2019

Last post-money valuation: $95 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $51 million, according to the company

CEO: Austin Link

Founders: Austin Link and Dr. Trevor Bennett

Select investors: Shield Capital, Point72, TRAC

Statsig

What it does: Digital product testing platform that runs rapid product experiments and analyzes users' responses to new features and functionality

Founded: 2021

Last post-money valuation: $420 million, according to the company

Total raised: $53 million, according to the company

CEO and founder: Vijaye Raji

Select investors: Sequoia Capital, Madrona Venture Group

Vitable Health

What it does: Provides affordable primary and urgent care health coverage plans, including primary and urgent care, mental health, and care

Founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: $65 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $25 million, according to PitchBook

CEO and founder: Joseph Kitanga

Select investors: Y Combinator, First Round Capital, Softbank

• AI startup Perplexity bids to merge with TikTok's US business before potential shutdown.
• Perplexity was recently valued at $9 billion, a lot less than the estimated value of TikTok US.
• Perplexity backers include SoftBank and Nvidia, with $914 million in funding secured: PitchBook.

Hours before TikTok could go dark, AI startup Perplexity has put in a bid to merge with the platform's US business, according to a person familiar with the matter.

It's unclear how a startup of Perplexity's size could merge with an operation this huge. The startup was recently valued at $9 billion, while TikTok's US operations could be worth $40 billion to $50 billion, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives estimated earlier on Saturday.

"We now expect a slew of TikTok bids to come over the coming weeks from a host of larger tech players, private-equity, and other strategic names for this key social media platform," Ives wrote in a note to investors.

The person familiar with Perplexity's bid said the combined entity would include other institutional investors. This person declined to name these other investors, and asked not to be identified discussing private matters. CNBC reported the news earlier on Saturday.

A law passed by Congress and signed by President Biden last spring requires ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese owner, to sell the app's US operations by January 19 or be banned.

While Perplexity is relatively small compared to TikTok US, the startup does have large, deep-pocketed backers including SoftBank, Nvidia, and the venture capital firm IVP.

Perplexity has secured $914 million in funding to date, according to PitchBook data. In April, investors valued Perplexity at $1 billion. That figure soared to $9 billion in the newest round of funding, which closed in December.

The startup uses artificial intelligence to power a new type of search engine that responds to queries with a brief answers and annotations, instead of a list of links.

Correction: January 18, 2025 — An earlier version of this story misstated who besides Perplexity is involved in this bid.

• Insight Partners has raised $12.5 billion for new software investments as the tech market heats up.
• The new funds mark the largest raise by a VC firm in over two years, per PitchBook data.
• Insight investors say they expect a higher caliber of startups to show up for funding this year.

As more startups go to fundraise to top off their bank accounts, Insight Partners is leaning into the opportunity with billions in new cash for its software investments.

Insight has closed on $12.5 billion for its newest set of funds, Business Insider has learned. The sum is little more than half the size of its previous fundraise of $20 billion in 2022 — a big step down that Insight managing director Ryan Hinkle says is indicative of a "great reset" in tech investing over the last several years.

The firm will allocate the new funds across several different categories: its 13th flagship fund, buyout investments, and an opportunities fund, which provides later-stage companies with financing that combines debt and equity features. Insight declined to share the exact financial breakdown of funds.

Insight had initially set out to raise $20 billion for this set of funds, The Financial Times reported last year. The firm lowered its target as investors in venture capital funds broadly backed off the asset class, spooked by plunging tech stock prices, geopolitical chaos, and recession fears. Household names like Tiger Global and TCV have also switched up strategies and closed funds below their targets in recent years.

Insight's $12.5 billion haul is still an impressive get in a market that's limping back to normalcy. According to PitchBook data, the new funds mark the largest sum raised by a venture capital firm in over two years. In 2024, General Catalyst raked in $8 billion in fresh capital, while Andreessen Howoritz's newest fundraise topped $7.2 billion.

Insight invests in companies from the seed round to the IPO and focuses on categories powered by software, such as healthcare, cybersecurity, data, and the future of work. The firm employs about 485 people, including a hundred investment professionals — a massive dragnet for sourcing and closing deals. Early investments include Twitter, Alibaba, Shopify, and, more recently, buzzy AI startups like Jasper, Wiz, and Writer.

Insight returned over $8 billion to the firm's own investors last year out of profits from exits in the portfolio, according to the firm. Among them, Salesforce bought Own, a data management provider, for $1.9 billion, and Mastercard purchased the threat intelligence company Recorded Future from Insight for over $2 billion.

Insight has gassed up the tank as investors widely expect funding for startups to rebound. In late 2022, many founders saw the writing on the wall and cut spending to stretch their cash reserves further. Fewer founders went out to fundraise in an investor-friendly market. Two and a half years later, some of those same founders are now electing to raise money again in order to lean into risk and spend to grow. Hinkle said Insight is eagerly awaiting those firms.

"The better the income statement and performance of these companies, the less likely they have been raising capital the past two and a half years," said Hinkle, noting he was generalizing.

"This is my expectation, at least, that the batch of companies that hasn't raised since 2021, they're either thinking about an exit, which is good because we can buy those companies, or they're thinking about raising capital again, which is good because we can provide the capital," Hinkle said. Either way, he said, Insight has a product for them.

Praveen Akkiraju, a managing director at Insight, had another reason to feel optimistic. Software spending cooled off in the downturn, but more businesses are planning to increase their tech budgets to capture the efficiencies that artificial intelligence can provide. Recent leaps in the field, such as the application of "agents" and the shrinking cost of computing, have also amplified their interest. This is good news for software companies that sell into the enterprise market.

"Every company cares about AI. It doesn't matter if you're legacy software, hardware, transportation, construction, or you're an electrician," Akkiraju said. "That's what's unique about this. It's enabling tech that's going to fundamentally lift the entire ecosystem."

Hinkle also offered a caveat to his funding outlook. He doesn't expect startups to come to market for funding in the same numbers as they did in 2021. Dealmaking will remain subdued, he said. Hinkle put it this way: After weeks of freezing temperatures in New York, 42 degrees and sun can feel downright tropical. But it's still frigid. And the tech winter hasn't thawed yet.

• Kevin Egan, a former chief sales officer at Atlassian, has joined the venture-capital firm IVP.
• Egan worked in the trenches of Salesforce, Dropbox, and Slack in the early days of the cloud.
• At IVP, Egan will help close investments and assist portfolio companies with their sales strategy.

IVP, a 45-year-old venture-capital firm that has backed Slack, Coinbase, Glean, and Perplexity, is building out its brain trust with the addition of Kevin Egan as a venture partner. Egan stepped down as chief sales officer at Atlassian in August.

Egan is an enterprise sales guru who scaled Salesforce, Slack, and Dropbox in the early days of the cloud. Now he's joining one of the most enduring venture firms on Sand Hill Road to help its startups at an inflection point — they've figured out a product that the market wants and now need to scale it, said Ajay Vashee, a general partner at IVP.

"Kevin was the go-to-market exec that helped to make that happen for us," said Vashee, who worked with Egan at Dropbox as chief financial officer.

Salesforce to Slack

Egan has worked in the trenches of some of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies of the past 25 years. He spent a decade at Salesforce in sales and operations before Dropbox brought him on in 2012.

Dropbox was the king of cloud storage, with 100 million users, but it had yet to push into the business market. Egan won over big clients such as Under Armour and NBCUniversal, helping establish the cash flow Dropbox needed to go public. He left in 2016 amid a flurry of executive departures.

Egan spent the past 3 ½ years at Atlassian, the $63 billion maker of collaboration software like Jira and Trello. That company exploded during the pandemic because of the rapid adoption of cloud services, though growth slowed as software sales cycles broadly became longer and more expensive in a weak economy. Egan said he was able to control churn by getting "closer to the customer" and helping them realize the financial return on their investment.

Following years of softening software spending, the outlook is brightening, Vashee said. Startups such as Jasper, which develops workflow tools for marketing teams, and Superhuman, an email app that drafts replies and summarizes emails, are seeing traction selling into the business market, said Vashee, who's invested in both.

Enterprises are investing in AI tools as they recognize the long-term efficiencies and competitive advantages that software can provide. Recent leaps in the field and the shrinking cost of computing have also amplified their interest.

"What a lot of those companies have realized, and what the broader ecosystem has come to terms with, is that the real opportunity is in the more focused enterprise applications of AI," Vashee said. That has forced some companies to evolve their sales strategy, a task that's squarely in Egan's wheelhouse.

In his new role, Egan will help source and close new investments and work with portfolio companies to strategize how to scale faster and better. He adds to the firm's bench of former operators in venture partner roles, including Tamar Yehoshua, who is also a product leader at the buzzy enterprise search startup Glean.

In addition to Egan, IVP has poached Zeya Young from Andreessen Horowitz and Miloni Madan Presler from Summit Partners, the firm told Business Insider exclusively. Yang focuses on AI, enterprise software, and healthcare companies, while Madan Presler invests in enterprise software and infrastructure companies. The firm is also hiring a partner in its London office.

Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI, has prophesied that this may be the year the first "agents" — a set of artificial intelligence tools that can perform tasks on their own — "join the workforce." Investors whose job it is to back new technologies before they become ubiquitous are swooning with the promise of these digital coworkers.

The rise of agents offers a fertile ground for a select group of startups to establish themselves as the front-runners of this shift. In that spirit, Business Insider reviewed viewed press releases, news articles, and PitchBook data for startups exploring the application of agents across various sectors and then filtered for those companies that raised rounds of more than $25 million and less than $75 million in 2024. The result is a list of 20 startups that seem positioned to scale this year on the back of new funding.

"If 2024 was the year of LLMs, we believe 2025 will be the year of agentic AI," said Praveen Akkiraju, a managing director at Insight Partners, whose agentic plays include Writer, Jasper, and Torq.

The last wave of artificial intelligence brought copilots, a type of virtual assistant designed to work side-by-side with a user. Some write code, some recap meetings or emails, and some scribe notes on a physician's behalf. Copilots require some human hand-holding but significantly amplify productivity and efficiency.

Since that breakthrough, a new generation of virtual assistants has emerged. Agents describe an artificial intelligence that can complete tasks without much human supervision. They don't just assist — they take charge. Agents can break down complex tasks into smaller sub-tasks, make decisions, execute plans, and adjust their approach based on outcomes.

Here's a simple way to think about the difference: a copilot can assist with crafting a tailored vacation itinerary, while an agent can go further by booking the flights, reserving the hotel, and organizing activities — all without a user needing to intervene at each step.

With Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI's significant investments in agentic models and the subsequent investor hysteria around this technology, it's clear that agents are the flavor of the season. PitchBook data shows startups exploring the application of agents have alone raised $8.2 billion in 2024.

Jill Chase, a partner at CapitalG, a growth fund under Alphabet, said software infrastructure that makes agents work "will be poised for explosive growth." Aaron Jacobson, a partner at NEA and early investor in Databricks, said enterprises will deploy agents at large to "make a real business impact." Seema Amble, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, suggested that agents will change how professionals use software.

"In the short term, human workers will be the reviewer in the loop," said Amble, an enterprise software investor. "In the future, as trust is established over time, I expect many data-derived actions will shift toward being entirely a set of narrowly defined task-driven agents."

Here's a list of agentic startups who have raised rounds of more than $25 million and less than $75 million in 2024, ranked from the least amount raised to the most amount raised.

Maven AGI

What it is: Maven AGI reimagines enterprise customer support by leveraging agents.

Founded: 2023

Total funding: $28 million

Notable deal: Maven AGI launched from stealth with $28 million in Series A funding led by M13 in May of 2024.

Wordware

What it is: Polish-British startup Wordware is building a software platform that can develop and deploy agents using plain English rather than code.

Founded: 2021

Total funding: $30 million

Notable deal: At $30 million, Wordware's November 2024 fundraise is one of the largest seed rounds in Y Combinator's history, the startup. said. Spark Capital led the funding round, with YC and VC firm Felicis participating.

Decagon

What it is: Decagon is developing agents that act as customer support representatives for enterprise customers.

Founded: 2023

Total funding: $35 million

Notable deal: Decagon emerged from stealth in June of 2024 and announced both its $30 million Series A and $5 million seed rounds. The startup's investors include Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, and Elad Gil.

Resolve AI

What it is: Resolve AI is building a production-engineer agent that troubleshoots errors and solves production issues, freeing up human engineers' time to create new products and features.

Founded: 2024

Total funding: $35 million

Notable deal: Greylock led Resolve AI's $35 million seed round in November 2024. Unusual Ventures also participated in the round alongside angel investors 'Godmother of AI' Fei-Fei Li, Google DeepMind's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and executives from OpenAI, GitHub, AWS, and Notion also participated in the round.

Norm Ai

What it is: Norm Ai enables corporate compliance chiefs to convert regulations, from public laws to company policies, into working computer code.

Founded: 2023

Total funding: $38 million

Notable deal: Norm Ai raised a $27 million Series A round led by Coatue in June of 2024, following an $11 million seed round earlier in the year.

7AI

What it is: Founded by two cybersecurity veterans, 7AI is building a "swarm" of agents that monitor for threats and protect enterprise companies from cyberattacks.

Founded: 2023

Total funding: $36 million

Notable deal: 7AI launched from stealth in June of 2024 with a $36 million seed funding round led by Greylock. CRV and Spark Capital also participated in the round.

Robin AI

What it is: Buzzy legaltech startup Robin offers a copilot for lawyers to help draft and revise contracts.

Founded: 2019

Total funding: $39 million

Notable deal: Singapore investment company Temasek led Robin's $26 million Series B funding round in January 2024, and VC firms QuantumLight, Plural, and AFG Partners also participated in the round.

Braintrust

What it is: Developers at companies like Airtable, Instacart, and Stripe use Braintrust to build, monitor, and troubleshoot their artificial intelligence applications.

Founded: 2023

Total funding: $45 million

Notable deal: Andreessen Horowitz led a $36 million Series A round of funding for Braintrust in August of 2024.

Lawhive

What it is: Lawhive's artificial intelligence-powered legal assistant, Lawrence, automates routine legal tasks, from client onboarding and compliance checks to document drafting.

Founded: 2019

Total funding: $52 million

Notable deal: Lawhive closed two rounds of funding just eight months apart, with a $10 million seed round in April of 2024 and a $40 million Series A round in December.

Qodo

What it is: Formerly known as CodiumAI, Qodo deploys agents into the coding process to take over tasks such as generation, testing, review, and documentation.

Founded: 2022

Total funding: $50 million

Notable deal: Qodo raised a $40 million Series A funding round in September of 2024 led by Susa Ventures and Square Peg. Firestreak Ventures, ICON Continuity Fund, TLV Partners, and Vine Ventures also participated in the round.

Rox

What it is: Rox's agents assist sales teams by monitoring customer activity, identifying risks and opportunities, and recommending action plans for human employees.

Founded: 2024

Total funding: $50 million

Notable deal: Rox completed its seed and Series A rounds in stealth. The deals — totaling $50 million from investors including GV, Sequoia, and General Catalyst — were announced in November of 2024.

Decart

What it is: Decart builds enterprise and consumer products on top of its own infrastructure stack, designed to reduce some of the costs of building or using artificial intelligence models.

Founded: 2023

Total funding: $53 million

Notable deal: Decart emerged from stealth with $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia Capital and Zeev Ventures in October of 2024, and raised another $32 million in a Series A round led by Benchmark in December.

HeyGen

What it is: HeyGen, a generative AI video creator for enterprises, launched agents as virtual avatars that can provide around-the-clock customer support.

Founded: 2020

Total funding: $60 million

Notable deal: Benchmark led HeyGen's $60 million Series A in June of 2024. Other investors in the round included Thrive Capital, Bond Capital, Conviction, Dylan Field, Elad Gil, Aviv Nevo, Neil Mehta, and SV Angel.

11x

What it is: 11x builds artificial intelligence-powered sales development reps for handling the workflows of traditional revenue teams.

Founded: 2022

Total funding: $76 million

Notable deal: Andreessen Horowitz led a $50 million Series B round for 11x in November of 2024, just two months after the startup grabbed $24 million in a Series A round led by Benchmark.

Astrix Security

What it is: Astrix Security is creating a security platform to shield an enterprise customer's agents from cyberattacks.

Founded: 2021

Total funding: $85 million

Notable deal: Astrix closed a $45 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures in December of 2024. Workday Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, CRV, and F2 Venture Capital also participated.

Ema

What it is: Ema is building agents called "personas" that complete complex business tasks for their human employee counterparts.

Founded: 2023

Total funding: $61 million

Notable deal: Ema increased its Series A funding round to $50 million in July of 2024, and counts Accel, Section 32, Prosus Ventures, Sozo Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, Wipro Ventures, SCB 10X, Colle Capital, and Frontier Ventures among its investors.

You.com

What it is: You.com's multi-agent system enables knowledge workers to conduct research, create content, and build custom agents on top of any artificial intelligence model for virtually any task.

Founded: 2020

Total funding: $99 million

Notable deal: Georgian led a $50 million Series B round of funding for You.com in September of 2024.

Anysphere

What it is: Anypshere, the startup behind the artificial intelligence-powered code editor, Cursor, allows developers to turn terse directives into working code.

Founded: 2022

Total funding: $171 million

Notable deal: Anysphere raised back-to-back rounds of funding just four months apart, with a $60 million Series A round in August of 2024 and a $100 million Series B round in December. The latest round crowned Anyshere a unicorn with a valuation of $2.6 billion.

Torq

What it is: Torq's multi-agent system enables security professionals to create and deploy sophisticated workflows, triage alerts, and respond to security events.

Founded: 2020

Total funding: $192 million

Notable deal: Torq closed two separate rounds of funding in the last 12 months, including a $42 million Series B round and a $70 million Series C round led by Evolution Equity Partners.

Legion

What it is: Legion, a workforce management platform used by companies like Barry's and Five Below, has developed agents to predict customer demand across locations, create and analyze schedules and timesheets, and reduce human bias.

Founded: 2016

Total funding: $195 million

Notable deal: Legion won $50 million in financing from Silicon Valley Bank in December of 2024, following a $50 million growth round led by Riverwood Capital earlier last year.

• VC firm Flybridge is using AI for writing investment memos, a critical part of any diligence.
• It's making the generator available for public use via its website and GitHub.
• Flybridge aims to help founders refine pitches and save investors time on routine tasks.

When Chip Hazard, a longtime startup investor at Flybridge, finds a startup he wants to fund, he writes a multi-page investment memo for his partners, outlining in detail all the risk factors and opportunities of a business. Now, he's using AI to help write these documents and saving hours of work.

It's the latest example of how venture firms are eating their own dog food. Investors aren't only funding startups exploring the application of large language models and "agents." They're also experimenting with these tools internally to improve how they source deals, research companies before investing, and track performance.

"If we could free up capacity on more routine tasks and therefore give us more time for judgment," said Hazard, "that's a good trade in our business."

This week, Flybridge is unveiling the AI-powered memo generator to the public — free for anyone to use.

How it works

Following the release of ChatGPT, Hazard made a cheeky bet with an associate at his firm: he promised a bottle of wine from his private collection if the associate could build an artificial intelligence that writes investment memos.

Flybridge's memo generator looks like a simple web form. The user uploads a pitch deck and a transcript of the pitch, fills in the round size and valuation, and adds links to the founder's LinkedIn page and the company website.

Under the hood, the memo generator was built on top of OpenAI's o1 model, according to Daniel Porras Reyes, a self-taught developer and Flybridge associate. This model is considered superior to its successors because o1 was designed to spend more time thinking before providing an answer, improving its output quality.

Flybridge used CrewAI, a portfolio company, to build "agents" — a new set of artificial intelligence tools that can work autonomously without much human supervision. Those agents can search the web through Exa, a search engine designed for use by agents, and create content about a company's competitive landscape or market size.

In as little as three minutes, the memo generator spits out a Word document with sections on the opportunity, risks, business model, go-to-market strategy, and team. It also proposes a list of follow-up questions for the founders.

Hazard said that by releasing the tool to the general public, Flybridge hopes that founders will run their pitch decks or investment memos through the generator before they meet with the firm. This could give founders an idea of how their pitch comes across so they can smooth out the kinks ahead of time.

Like most generative AI tools, the memo generator sometimes gets it wrong. It might leave a competitor off the list, said Porras Reyes, or reach a wrong number in the financial projections, Hazard added. Still, Hazard said the product shaves hours off of production; he spends less time writing a founder's bio, for instance, and more time thinking about whether they have the right characteristics and the best idea.

Hazard said if the memo generator was more capable, users might be tempted to "check their judgment at the door." He continued, "The point is to have it 'good enough' that you can then start to really apply your judgment."

Founders and investors can access Flybridge's open-source investment memo generator on its website or clone the project on GitHub.

• Bluesky, an alternative to X, saw a surge of users after Donald Trump was elected in November.
• The company is raising new funding that would value it around $700 million, according to three sources.
• The round is being led by Bain Capital Ventures, per the sources.

Bluesky is in the final stages of raising new funding led by Bain Capital Ventures, which would value the social media company at around $700 million, according to three sources familiar with the deal.

Bluesky and Bain Capital Ventures did not respond to comment.

Bluesky officially launched less than a year ago with 3 million users and grew to 25.9 million users in 2024, according to the company. Nearly half of those new users were added during the last month and a half of the year after Donald Trump won the US presidential election, and some X users fled the platform owned by Trump supporter Elon Musk.

Bluesky last raised a $15 million Series A round in 2024 and an $8 million seed round in 2023. It's unclear how much capital Bluesky is raising in this new round, which is still being finalized, and terms could change.

Bluesky told BI in late November it was growing so fast that it needed to add servers to keep up with demand.

"We have grown by a million users every day for the last eight days, which has blown past our projections, and so we were going to get new servers next year, but we had to fast forward that," said Rose Wang, Bluesky's COO.

Bluesky was originally formed in 2019 as an internal project at X, which was then known as Twitter, when founder Jack Dorsey was still CEO. Bluesky launched as a standalone Public Benefit Corporation in 2021, helmed by Jay Graber.

Dorsey resigned from Bluesky's board of directors in 2024 and criticized the app for "literally repeating all the mistakes" of Twitter.

The new funding would challenge Bluesky to figure out how to make money. The service still has no ads, and Bluesky said in 2023 it never wants to rely on advertising to sustain its business.

"We believe that there must be better strategies to sustain social networks that don't require selling user data for ads," the company said in a blog post.

Bluesky's user interface looks like a bare-bones X. Bluesky bills itself as a more utopian and safe alternative. It added many new features in 2024, including hashtags, direct messages, video sharing, and trending topics.

• Prospinity allows college students to share in their success through income-share agreements.
• Just a year old, the startup already has hundreds of Ivy League students using its product.
• Prospinity raised $2 million to expand to new universities in a deal led by Slow Ventures.

When they were freshmen at Yale, Aarya Agarwal and his roommate, Samvel Antonyan, struck a handshake deal.

If either of them ever started a company that went supernova, they would sign away 10% of their income to the other.

"We shook hands, and at the moment, it was a bit of a joke," Agarwal said. "But we realized the deal actually made a lot of economic sense. It was a way to multiply by two times our chances of doing something super improbable."

Now, their startup, Prospinity, allows college students to enter into similar contracts. Through its platform, smart young people can join "success pools" of other smart young people who put a few percentage points of their annual income into a shared pot. Each year, the pot gets distributed evenly among the group. The idea is that if one of them becomes the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, they will all succeed.

Just a year old, Prospinity is already used by students at Yale, MIT, Princeton, and Harvard, with job offers at firms like Blackstone, Bridgewater, and Amazon. Now, Prospinity has raised $2 million in a round led by Slow Ventures managing director Kevin Colleran to reach more students beyond the Ivy League.

Prospinity and Slow Ventures declined to comment on the valuation. Patrick Chung, a managing partner at Xfund and an investor in Sam Altman's first company, Loopt, also joined the round.

Slow Ventures has explored income sharing as an investment strategy before. It set aside $20 million from recent funds to buy equity in influencers, taking a percentage of their future profits for a set amount of time in exchange for upfront capital. Regulatory filings show Slow is now raising $275 million across two new funds, which Fortune first reported.

How Prospinity works

When Prospinity rolls out to a new university, it researches the student body and selects a handful of high achievers to create or join a success pool. They can hop onto Prospinity, check out the profiles of existing members, and filter by university or industry. Prospinity is now recruiting students from the University of California, Berkeley, to join the platform.

Prospinity says the contracts are legally binding and can ensure everyone pays their fair share over the agreement's term, typically 10 years. Pool members can also set a minimum income; if someone's earnings fall below the threshold, they're excluded from that year's distribution. Prospinity takes a 5% distribution cut in exchange for providing the technical and legal infrastructure to execute the contract.

While the company's hundreds of members are mostly still in school, they can start collecting distributions as other pool members contribute.

Agarwal, who studied computer science and economics at Yale before he dropped out to focus on Prospinity, said the company's premise is loosely based on the power law, a principle in venture capital that describes how a small number of investments often create the majority of returns, while the rest either break even or fail.

"As markets get more efficient, you're going to see more and more of these distributions where a few people make it big, and then everyone else tends to be left behind," Agarwal said. "I think success pools are going to be a very important way to hedge against that sort of uncertainty."

The company's founders, Agarwal and Antonyan along with Andrea Zanon and Andrea De Berardinis, belong to a larger success pool that agreed to share 2% of their income over a 10-year horizon.

Prospinity rolls out to more students

Hassaan Qadir, a Yale senior who took a semester off to start a company developing software for biology researchers, joined a Prospinity pool. He later folded the startup and accepted an internship at AppLovin, a Palo Alto company that provides marketing services to mobile app developers. Qadir plans to start another tech company someday and said being part of an income-sharing agreement with other founders gives him more chances of hitting the entrepreneurial jackpot.

Law school students, finance associates, and aspiring entrepreneurs compose his success pool of about 30 members.

"Theoretically, someone that you know is going to become really successful," Qadir said. "It's not totally up to who works the hardest."

Aron Ravin, another member of that same Prospinity pool, hopes to capture some potential upsides of being an entrepreneur as he climbs the corporate ladder. He joined that Prospinity pod during his senior year at Yale and now works as an associate at a prominent hedge fund. Ravin stands to make good money in finance, although he said he may not hit the jackpot as someone starting the next Uber or Palantir might.

Ravin declined to share how much of his income he's contributing to the pool but said it's between 1% and 5%. At a Prospinity mixer in New Haven, Connecticut, he mingled with some international students working on a sustainability venture, which got him thinking.

"It's a little promiscuous of me," Ravin said, "but maybe I'll join another pool in the future. Share the love."

After three years of tense reductions, the skies are clearing over Silicon Valley, and startup investors seem broadly optimistic about a resurgence in tech dealmaking.

We asked venture capitalists at 35 firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners, IVP, and Sapphire Ventures, to tell us what's hot and what's not in tech next year, how potential regulatory changes could rouse a sleepy exit market, and where artificial intelligence goes from here.

In 2025, venture capitalists expect a loosening of antitrust regulations under the new presidential administration. This could reignite acquisition activity by strategic buyers, which would allow funds to distribute proceeds from those deals to their own investors, or limited partners, and raise new funds to invest in the next generation of startups, said Brian Garrett, managing director at Crosscut Ventures.

In recent years, startups weren't the only ones facing a cash crunch. Established funds raised the lion's share of funding dollars, while many newish and boutique funds struggled to raise. A torrent of dealmaking, combined with Trump's return to the White House and an end to the political uncertainty, could mobilize investors in these funds who had been sitting on the sidelines to whip out their checkbooks, said Ivan Nikkhoo, a managing partner at Navigate Ventures.

"Uncertainty breeds defense, optimism breeds offense," said Matt Murphy, a partner at Menlo Ventures and early Anthropic investor. "We're going into a cycle where acquirers are feeling they need to play offense and startups feel like it's time to invest in leadership. And the IPO market is open for best-in-class assets."

From IPOs to robotaxis, these are the tech trends to watch in 2025, according to venture capitalists.

Infrastructure cools off, apps soar

Jai Das, president and partner at Sapphire Ventures: "A larger number of 'application layer' companies will have a breakout year with several crossing $100 million in revenues. I predict 50 companies will cross $50 million ARR while still growing 60%+, and at least 10 will hit $100 million ARR. A lot of these companies will be prosumer companies, but there will be several business application companies as well."

Ben Lerer, managing partner at Lerer Hippeau: "When you get the cost of compute going down as quickly as it has, and the number of options in terms of foundational models growing as it has, you end up with a really interesting time for the application layer to thrive. If you're a startup, you can go with the flavor of the month — not just a ChatGPT wrapper, or a Claude wrapper, or a Gemini wrapper, or you name it — but some combination of all of them to optimize functionality, results, and the cost of those results."

Lower rates kick the IPO market into gear

Sofia Dolfe, partner at Index Ventures: "2025 is the year we will see the IPO market opening back up. There are already signs that this is on the horizon: we're seeing gradual recovery, rates have started to come down, and there are many later-stage companies with the financial profiles to go public."

Michael Yang, senior managing partner at Omers: "Two kinds of companies will go public as the IPO window opens back up next year. First, the truly great businesses that are really scaled and have forecastable growth and would've gone public earlier if the IPO market was more favorable, and second, companies that entered into structured financings with dirtier terms that need to go public for timing reasons."

Nima Wedlake, managing director at Thomvest Ventures: "The IPO market will remain closed for most tech companies, with a high bar for entry — $300 million-plus ARR, fast growth, and cash-flow breakeven or better."

As crypto prices surge, founders return to the drawing table

Nihal Mehta, general partner at Eniac: "Guidance on what the regulations could be for crypto and AI would encourage founders to build productively within those areas."

Jai Das, president and partner at Sapphire Ventures: "The new administration is crypto-friendly, bringing with it an expected acceleration of crypto-based business models (especially those using stablecoins). I predict we'll have another crypto mania in 2025."

Some venture funds go belly-up

Wesley Chan, cofounder and managing partner at FPV Ventures: "In 2025, I predict a lot of contraction for VCs, except for top funds. We're still in a downturn. Some firms shut down, a lot of firms are not doing new deals, and you will see a lot of junior-mid level employees leave."

The great funding bifurcation continues

Molly Alter, partner at Northzone: "The 'sexiest' deals will continue to raise at sky-high valuations, but for the rest of the pack, companies will need to show very specific metrics to command a strong valuation. There will be a great bifurcation into the 'haves' and the 'have-nots.'"

Don Butler, managing director at Thomvest Ventures: "Startup shutdowns will increase, particularly at the seed stage, as companies run out of cash. This will influence valuations, with investors likely focusing on startups that have shown resilience or achieved meaningful milestones."

Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures: "Valuations will rise as growth rates and market multiples recover, but many companies still might not grow back into their ZIRP valuations. People are over that and won't let it get in the way of pursuing opportunity. Valuations for GenAI companies will continue to be outliers based on any historical metrics."

Robotaxis cover new terrain

Brian Walsh, head of Wind Ventures: "2025 will be the year that we enter the age of 'robo taxis' with, first, Waymo now well along its adoption S-curve in San Francisco and expanding quickly, and, second, Tesla favorably positioned with quickly maturing best-in-class autonomy technology (no human in the loop) and an existing large fleet to scale it."

Kasper Sage, managing partner at BMW i Ventures: "Autonomous fleet deployments will gain traction in controlled, high-density environments such as for applications like campus environments and logistics for heavy industries."

Trump policy heralds return of megadeals

Aaron Jacobson, partner at NEA: "With the change of administration, I expect the return of mega M&A deals. We are going to see a 'WhatsApp' like $20 billion-plus M&A outcome for a leading AI company."

Michael Yang, senior managing partner at Omers: "Big Tech will be back at the M&A table with a new administration and regulatory regime in place. They've been quieter in recent times but should be chomping at the bit to capitalize on what is still a buyer's market."

Funding rounds become even more fluid

Sasha McKenzie and Van Jones, both deal leads at Wellington Access Ventures at Wellington Management: "The concept of letter rounds in VC is becoming more amorphous. We're seeing $30 million and $100 million seed rounds, raising questions about what seed even means anymore. The model is shifting towards evaluating how quickly founders can run and how disciplined they are with results, rather than hitting historically stated milestones (e.g., $1 million in revenue to raise a Series A). There will be more nuance in how VCs evaluate progress, focusing more on the operator and their ability to balance vision with execution, based on the capital they have."

Multi-agent systems take center stage

Aaron Jacobson, partner at NEA: "Chatbots are overhyped. Agents are under-hyped. Enterprises will move beyond the low-hanging fruit of 'GPT-wrappers' to deploy digital workers that can reason and take action to make a real business impact."

Praveen Akkiraju, managing director at Insight Partners: "If 2024 was the year of LLMs, we believe 2025 will be the year of agentic AI — where highly capable state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs are combined with orchestration frameworks like memory, tool calling, and user-in-the-loop processes to build AI agents that can address progressively complex business workflows."

Seema Amble, partner at Andreessen Horowitz: "In the short term, human workers will be the reviewer in the loop; in the future, as trust is established over time, I expect many data-derived actions will shift toward being entirely a set of narrowly defined task-driven agents."

S. Somasegar, managing director at Madrona: "The world where we each have a digital assistant that works with a collection of AI agents is probably five to ten years out. But having AI agents that can do specific tasks really, really well is happening sooner and I think we will see a ton of progress on this in 2025."

Tender offers grow for a selective group of companies

Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner at NewView Capital: "The venture secondaries market will continue to be an important source of liquidity — a trend we think is here to stay due to structural dynamics of the venture asset class."

Simon Wu, partner at Cathay Innovation: "The size of tender offers has grown from millions to billions as the desire to own top-performing names by mutual funds and VCs increases, thus allowing some of the best names to stay private longer. Tenders are likely to get bigger to a selective group of companies in tandem with a more active IPO market next year."

Industry-specific software takes over

Molly Alter, partner at Northzone: "Vertical SaaS will become more highly valued than ever, due to the increasing difficulty of differentiating a product in horizontal categories."

Cathy Gao, partner at Sapphire Ventures: "Vertical software will evolve rapidly as AI moves to the agentic phase, enabling end-to-end automation of complex, industry-specific workflows that were once beyond the reach of software. By pairing deep domain expertise with intelligent automation, vertical AI will unlock new use cases, deliver outsized ROI, and become table stakes for staying competitive."

Fintech roars back

Alexa von Tobel, managing partner at Inspired Capital: "Given the new political climate, we, of course, expect to see less regulation across the board. I think we'll see acceleration in a few core categories, including fintech."

Marlon Nichols, managing partner at MaC Venture Capital: "Fintech is an area I'm excited to invest in, particularly fintech startups leveraging AI to create transformative personal finance tools."

Sydney Thomas, general partner at Symphonic Capital: "We are watching the regulatory environment towards fintech ease which has enabled massive speculation on what asset class will win. … This also means, many startups will be required to regulate themselves, which isn't always an easy thing to do."

Robots join society

Claire Yun, investor at Piva Capital: "Generative AI will continue to accelerate and supercharge robotics; simultaneously, we will see a choke point in human labor as an aging domestic workforce and protectionist policies create a sharp supply and demand imbalance. The result will be a colorful Cambrian explosion of robots as they step in to fill this gap."

Bob Ma, partner at Wind Ventures: "Urban areas will have fleets of robots on sidewalks, while drones will manage suburban and rural deliveries. Enhanced speed, cost-efficiency, and sustainability will redefine retail and e-commerce, with regulations supporting wider adoption and innovation."

Yuri Lee, partner at IVP: "As AI advances enable robots to move from structured, repetitive tasks to more complex and dynamic real-world applications, we'll see rapid progress in robotic perception, manipulation, and decision-making capabilities."

Small language models rise in popularity

Tasneem Dohadwala, partner at Excelestar Ventures: "Small language domain-specific models are starting to show more value. Instead of using vast swaths of the internet to train large models, these smaller models can be trained on specific datasets, such as medical journals, newspapers, or email collections. As a result, they are highly tailored and more accurate in reflecting a user's particular constraints and voice.

Michael Yang, senior managing partner at Omers: "If 2024 was the year of the LLMs, 2025 will be the year of small language models (SLMs) and proprietary data sets spawning the next generation of enterprise SaaS applications. Companies have realized that data in their midst can be harnessed in new and better ways than the 'structured workflow apps' of old and by leveraging targeted SLMs, they can do work differently, more efficiently."

Founders flock to private equity

Brad Bernstein, managing partner at FTB Capital: "Despite the IPO market showing better performance in Q3'24 with proceeds already surpassing 2023 totals, structural issues like regulatory burdens and governance challenges still pose obstacles for small and mid-cap companies. Private equity markets are stepping in to fill the gap, with growth equity deals comprising a larger share of activity and providing opportunities for startups in high-growth sectors like insurtech and healthcare tech."

Jai Das, president and partner at Sapphire Partners: "With the new administration, I predict we will see an uptick in exits, and much more tech M&A activity. We'll also see PE firms buying up a lot of companies once boards and management teams realize these businesses won't be able to grow at 30% at scale and ultimately, IPO."

Open-source foundation models come for OpenAI and xAI's lunch

Aaron Jacobson, partner at NEA: "Open-source foundation models will close the gap with the leading proprietary models. On top of this we will see a significant shift away from pre-training models from scratch to fine tuning OSS models and distilling them to smaller models for faster performance."

Mo Jomaa, partner at CapitalG: "I predict that in 2025 we will continue to see open source technologies consume the infrastructure layer in software. We have seen this trend play out in several categories already, including data and analytics (which led to our investment in Databricks) and observability (which drove our investment in Grafana). Enterprises will continue to adopt open source because it helps them save money, avoid vendor lock-in, and shape the product roadmaps of the technologies that they procure."

Record deals and dollars flow to cyber and national security

Andrew Schoen, partner at NEA: "We will see a surge of investment into technologies critical to restarting the US industrial base and enhancing national security. A record number of deals and dollars will go into AI, automation, cybersecurity, and frontier technology serving manufacturing, supply chain, and defense markets."

Jake Seid, general partner at Ballistic Ventures: "Over the next 18 months, we're going to see a lot more cybersecurity exits. While this may include an uptick in M&A activity, I expect we'll see cybersecurity companies go public in 2025 and in the first half of 2026 given how large the market for cyber products has become."

Trump's tech advisors bend his ear

Samir Kumar, general partner at Touring Capital: "We should expect a lot less regulatory headwinds in 2025 for AI given David Sacks will be the AI and crypto czar for the new administration. This is likely to even result in the repeal of President Biden's executive order on AI."

Francesco Ricciuti, associate at Runa Capital: "In the US, Trump is bringing prominent people from the startup and VC world in the government, and I wouldn't be surprised if the regulatory landscape will evolve towards entrepreneurship and technology."